Robert Creeley in Conversation with Alan RiachRobert Creeley
in Conversation with Alan Riach

Recorded at the University of Waikato
Hamilton, New Zealand
26 July 1995

{This is an edited version of a more extended conversation and has
been
prepared for publication by Dr Jan Pilditch and Dr Alan Riach of the
University of Waikato. It is published with the kind approval of
Robert
Creeley.}

Robert Creeley: 'I Know a Man'
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

Alan Riach: I think that's a marvellous poem, and although it's in
all
the anthologies, it strikes me as fresh every time I read it. I love
that
completely loose reference to 'the darkness' out there, outside, that
'surrounds us'...

RC: There was a very curious discussion of this poem in context
with
Philip Larkin's 'The Whitsun Weddings' as instances of the reemergence
of
Christian themes in contemporary poetry, somewhere back in the 60s. It
was
in the TLS. The contention was that the speaker of the poem is Jesus
Christ
and the John is John the Baptist. It was quite seriously made.

AR: Would you say that's a wrong interpretation?

RC: Oh, who am I to say? [Laughter] I only work here, I don't
know...
It seems to me absurd, frankly. But I only wrote the poem.

AR: So the poem is there for other people?

RC: Yeah, presumably, simply to read it as they will. It might be
that
somebody objected vigorously to the name 'John'. I can't preempt that.
It's a name that's both affectionate and familiar to me.

AR: It's a poem that's also self-conscious: 'Keep going, but watch
out
where you're going!'

AR: In a sense, the world of American poetry and the arts in the
1950s
is a world of excess.

RC: Well, it is and it isn't. Let me just think of when the dates
are,
there, specifically. I'm going to say this poem, 'I Know a Man', was
written in 1955 and whether that's entirely accurate I don't
know. This is
the Eisenhower era. I remember it was written in San Francisco and I
remember that I was literally at wit's end, so it is a curious double.
Noone said this to me but I'm saying it to myself for sure.

My marriage had fallen apart. I'd left Black Mountain, had
come to
San Francisco, I was crashed for a time on Ed Dorn and his wife then
Helene
and their family. I'd just met Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg. I'd just
connected with my terrific peers, and I was living in this little
apartment
on Montgomery Street off Broadway, but the point is I had no
prospects, in
one old-fashioned sense, but the whole world was mine!
The echo for me comes much later. It's Bob Dylan's, 'There
must be
some way out of this, said the jester to the thief...' That, to me, is
the
context. What I'm saying is 'let's get out of here' and then there is
this
curious not saying we've got to stick here and do our job in some
responsible disposition, but that there is no way, there's no way out
of
this.

AR: You mentioned Black Mountain there.

RC: Right.

AR: When I mentioned a world of excess I was thinking of abstract
expressionist painting, improvisatory music and dance, ballet, and the
kind
of spontaneity and 'high energy discharge' as Charles Olson called
it,
that you find in Olson's poetry. Olson invited you to Black Mountain
College in the first place. Can you tell us a little about that?

RC: The college I knew was... Well, there were two colleges. I
knew the
college briefly two particular times. My first wife Ann had gone there
as
a student in the mid 40s and just before I went into the American
Field
Service she'd left Radcliffe where she'd been initially a student and
she
went there. I remember our relationship was sadly foundering and I'd
gone
down to try to persuade her of my love and all that, very truly. I had
gone
by bus and so I came into Black Mountain.
And I remember at that time Alfred Kazin was teaching
there. It was
a much more contained and comfortable place than the one I
subsequently
knew about. Everything was open. The dormitories were in reasonable
shape
and the whole physical plant was employed and working.
When I got there in 54 the whole business was much more
fragile
economically. It was beginning to collapse entirely. The plant was
deteriorating, the resources for paying staff and for keeping the
place
together were much, much depleted. In some ways, emotionally,
probably, I
liked that better.
But it was glorious. I mean, the people there were just
impeccable,
the staff and the students both.

AR: How important was the isolated location of the College?

RC: I think it was probably the most stupid place to put this
particular college that could have been imagined. I mean it was very
handsome, physically, it was a very handsome sight, but they couldn't
have
chosen a less hospitable place. Simply that, you know, Black Mountain
and
the whole Swannanoa Valley, that gap, was absolutely, it was dense as
an
old time Baptist retreat ground, classic heavy duty fundamentalist
Baptist.
Seems to me, I may be in error, but I do remember seeing Billy Graham
in
the drug store in Black Mountain. It was a very small town. I think it
was
his home town. It was all through there.
So here in this utterly conservative Christian community came
this
utterly untoward cluster of people, Europeans, disjuncts from the
world
they didn't like. They did not like these people. It was a lovely but
poor
place and they didn't like urban people. They didn't like
northerners. I
remember being told in a public situation, you know, 'Yankee, get out
of
here!'

AR: Can you recollect some of your teaching there?

RC: Well, I recall it was my first time ever teaching which I had
had no
training or habit of, so that I remember vividly getting there in this
old
truck I'd left in New Hampshire. I'd come from Majorca, had come on a
boat, which docked finally in Albany in New York, taken a bus over to
Littleton, New Hampshire, where I got my old truck, got my cat,
actually,
that we'd left with friends, and headed -- this is now three years
after
having left -- headed down toward North Carolina, and I stopped in
New York
in order to see Paul Blackburn and my battery wasn't, the generator
was
gone in the truck, so I got that fixed then headed on down, and must
have
got into Black Mountain sometime, let's say a day or two later, and I
remember coming in sort of early mid-morning, meeting Olson for the
first
time D he was, I remember, he had this big towel, he was just taking a
shower and he had this big towel on, this huge man...

AR: Olson was about seven feet tall...

RC: Well, he was six eight, six four. He was a big, big man. He
wasn't
particularly heavy, but he was tall, indeed, and barrel chested, so
that
was terrific, and I, and he said, 'Well, you'll probably want to get
right
to work...' I thought, 'No, no, I won't want to get right to work.' He
said, 'Well, everyone's waiting for you. Why don't you meet with them,
you
know, this afternoon, or something like that...' 'You're kidding.'
'No,
no...' [Laughter] So we met. And Mike Rumaker tells later, makes
comment
later, that for the first three weeks, he said, he could personally
not
understand a word I was saying. He couldn't hear me clearly. I was so
shy
and so muttering that he couldn't really hear a word I was saying. So
we
moved from the usual seminar room to some student's study, to an even
smaller, we were finally in a room where everybody's knees were
touching, I
remember that. And finally people could begin to hear me and my own
shyness
was overcome by the fact that I was practically sitting in the lap of
the
person next to me and it, also, our group had now resolved as possibly
six
to eight people. There used to be this charming girl who would come in
very
eager and then would just fall asleep and so once she was asleep it
was as
though a magic hush and permission occurred. We'd all begin to relax
and
talk comfortably and then she'd sort of wake at the end of the class
once
again and off we'd go. [Laughter]

But the classes, I recall, were particularly interesting. I
was
'trying to teach' (quote), William Carlos Williams. He was my great
love
and I remember this semester involved with Williams, in which we
basically
read the Collected Later Poems... I remember this terrific student
[Tom Field]
coming and saying afterwards, 'You know, I feel as though I know
Williams
absolutely, and I have this extraordinary sense of knowing these
poems, not
understanding but knowing, I know them...' Incredible. 'But,' he said,
'I
never had a chance to ask you what you thought of them.' [Laughter]
It was the most terrific compliment I ever got as a teacher,
this
person utterly transformed with his love for Williams but he, quote,
'didn't know what I thought about them'. I felt I'd done my work. It
was
now time to move on.

AR: You'd passed the message over without interfering...

RC: Intact, without interfering. No hands. He can open it
himself... I
was really dearly pleased by that. Tom Field. I'll never forget him.

AR: Were you teaching creative writing at the same time?

RC: I had a writing group. I remember Mike Rumaker wrote this
incredible story, which... We would have the habit of... A student or
a
person would read to the group what he or she had written, then
there'd
usually be some talk about it. 'Would you read that again?' I don't
think
we had a xerox; we had no means to distribute it, so it meant, 'Could
I
hear that again?' There would be the usual discussion. People would
give
impressions or what they thought it might be improved by.
So anyhow, Mike had read this story. God, it was... I'll never
forget it. I don't think he ever published it. It was the story of two
brothers, one a bit older and one a bit younger and, but one say was
about
15 or 16 and the other's about 20 or so and they lived in the classic
sort
of suburban house. The story begins with the older brother just
getting
married and the ceremony and the local celebration. Then they go off
in the
car. And the young brother's feeling very displaced with the loss of
the
life that he and his brother had had. Now he'll never know him again
that
way. So he's lying in bed musing in this bedroom they had shared and
at
that moment there's a kind of scrabbling on the window and it turns
out
it's his brother. He can't go through with it. He's freaked and he's
come
home and he's asking for his younger brother to let him in, you know,
because he's... And it was such a pristine, curious fable of
transition and
rites of passage and much that was obviously in Mike's confusion at
that
point. I just didn't want to talk about it. I remember saying to the
class,
'That's it. No discussion.'
And for something like a week Mike thought I hadn't liked the
story.

AR: In a sense, that story crystallises a feeling that attaches to
the
whole period...

RC: Right.

AR: ...A rite of passage, a transitional period in the history of
modern American poetry. If you take your bearings from Ezra Pound,
T.S.
Eliot, William Carlos Williams and Olson and yourself, Ed Dorn and so
on...

RC: Right.

AR: Olson was an important influence on your own life and your own
work. There are nine volumes of your correspondence with him, which
cover
two years, 1950 to 1952. At least as much material remains
unpublished,
letters from 52 to 54, when you finally met. They give this terrific
impression that in hammering out the ideas between you, corresponding,
with
a terrific ferocity throughout that whole period, sending letters off,
sometimes more than one per day, to each other, pushing these ideas
through, about form, in poetry, and about the artist in the social
world,
about what has to change, and how 'the sights' (one of the great
phrases),
how 'the sights have to be lowered' from the egocentricity Pound
suffered
throughout his career, that in a sense, through that correspondence,
there
is a kind of tunnelling out from under the rubble and the debris, not
only
of World War II, which must have been prevailing the entire western
world,
but also specifically in terms of poetry, out from under the weight of
a
man like Ezra Pound...

RC: George Barker is quoted in Williams's Paterson, as saying,
'American poetry is a very simple subject to discuss, simply because
it
does not exist.' And the date for that must be at least the late 30s
or the
early 40s. I remember knowing George Barker and liking him, indeed. He
was
a very warm, good-natured, droll person, so he certainly wasn't being
simply malevolent; but it was almost the tongue-in-cheek...
Anyhow, who knows why he quite said it or where he quite said
it,
but the point is that as a so-called American poet, particularly as
one
recognised one's elders who were facing it, there was an immensely,
either
condescending or else dismissing disposition. I mean, here, we
thought,
here's this various and substantial place with all its factually
remarkable
artists, writers, and we have apparently no communal or collective
authority whatsoever. It was like, we just, we aren't there, we're
invisible, we just don't count.
I remember being in Paris and finding that one recognised in
all
the spectrum of the arts that there was, not a war on, but, there was
an
attempt clearly from an American situation, as a fact of the results
of the
war, to claim international significance as an authority, as a fact,
in the
arts. The contest was particularly active vis a vis painting and the
visual
arts. When the school of Paris collapses, and the New York school
takes
over, it was almost as though they were sold. There was a lot of
commercial
disposition in that for damn sure.

In writing, the authority had already pretty much begun to
lean
toward America, certainly in fiction and in the so-called novel,
although
obviously my generation certainly remembers vividly the continuing
authority of Britain, you know, the British. C.P. Snow... I wonder who
curls up with C.P. Snow these days? or Elizabeth Bowen? But then,
there was
Henry Green and there were a lot of extraordinary, interesting
novelists
who were getting it on. The poets were still, you know, I mean Auden
was
still, certainly... Then there were people like Gascoyne and the kind
of
funky various bright people...
I remember British friends were saying, 'God! You Americans
are
endlessly talking theory and prosody and all this bullshit! Don't you
have
anything? Don't you have any tradition? I mean, don't you have any way
of
writing that at least locates you in the same way that you might, you
know,
locate ways of dressing or furniture for your house or something? But
do
you have to be so endlessly paranoid about what you're doing? I mean,
who
cares? If you like the poem isn't that the point? And there's theories
and
projects and I mean...'
'Well,' I said, 'It's probably we're defensive and we've got
to
have some means whereby to explain ourselves to some possible other
who
hasn't as yet come along but one day may show up.'
There weren't a great number of people asking about how do you
write a poem but something like Williams's I Wanted to Write a Poem is
poignant in that way...

AR: There was a lot of theorising going on with Olson
particularly, in
the correspondence. There's that famous phrase, 'Form is never more
than
an extension of content'. The part of that phrase that I always linger
on
is 'never more than'...

RC: 'Never more...' 'Quoth the Raven, Nevermore!' [Laughter]
Well, there was, but... 'You use,' they will say, 'You use a
very
abstract, you know, your language is, I mean, your structure, your way
of
speaking is very abstract!'
And I think, 'Oh no, it isn't, rain is rain in my writing, you
know? Come on!' You understand what I'm saying? 'That's really not the
point. Your way of configuring or stating or locating things is quite
abstract.' And I think that, on the one hand I yearn for a reifying,
you
know, for contact, as Williams would say, or for ground. On the other
hand,
the ground was interesting most in how it permitted me to fly off it
or how
it permitted me to bounce, so that the ground was, you know, I loved
it but
I didn't, you know...
For instance, in present interests or parlances, a phrase such
as
'virtual reality' would be the fact of an imagination without the
authority
of imagination. It would be, you know, the 'affective reality'. What
happens if you don't have any sleep for six days? You might feel a
certain
way, which would certainly be real to you, but it would be the affect
of
having not slept for six days, so that it would be a conditioned
reality or
a reality arrived at through particular exercise and particular...

AR: Does that mean that so much of this is essentially personal,
lyrical, individual expression? That the poetry has to emerge from a
kind
of imagination that's worked from a charge that is personal, rather
than
something, let's say... Well, Pound, for example, one of the weights
he
bequeathes, is his position as a man speaking politically for people
in a
public way. He might be misguided, or horrible, or wrong, but he's
engaged
in a social language which isn't the language of a love lyric, or of a
personal confession or expression of personal belief or faith or
love. It's
a different kind of address...

RC: It is and it isn't. I mean, I was struck by I think it was
Hugh
Kenner in some discussion I happened to hear just by fluke a radio
programme had him talking with someone about the epic and about the
address
to epic scale, or kinds of writing, thinking of obvious counters such
as
War and Peace or Victor Hugo or great panoramic novels or even
something
like Ford Madox Ford in the Tietjens series. But as he said, almost no
American novel has the scale of that kind of address. Almost none that
one
can think of.
One can think of Faulkner, who might be proposed to such, but
he
really isn't doing that. These are very singular and isolating
stories,
although they propose to be a landscape of various social climate in
fact
they are, literally, they are the Snopes family, and they're very
particular. Look, they're not the world by any imagination. And then
you
think of someone like Dos Passos. No. The authority in Dos Passos is
Dos
Passos, not the world that he's... It's like the photographer, he's
taking
those pictures. By and large the American genius such as it is and I
think
it is has to do with the singular lyric.
You know, I think it's Walt Whitman, 'Song of Myself' -- I
think
that's the prototypical American gesture, poetically and imaginatively
and
artistically, and I think it's as true of Emily Dickinson as it is of
Pound
as it is of Poe as it is of Melville. I think Melville again could be
that,
certainly, could be an epic possibility, and yet its resolution is
Ahab and
the white whale and that's not a collective enterprise no matter
whether it
takes whaling to get there. So that I think what defines American art
is
(quote) whatever it is we call 'lyric' and the singular.
And I think, for example, I remember years ago as a kid, my
dear
friend Rainer Gerhardt, and we were talking about just this fact of
things,
and he said, 'You know, even during the worst moments of Hitler's
regime,'
he said, 'when I wrote or said anything it never occurred to me I
wasn't
writing for all of Germany. Not writing to it, but as a person of
it. Never
thought of myself as separated. No matter how obviously shattered the
country was, I was always all Germany.'
And I said, 'Well, you know, in America, I can't think of a
single
person I know who would ever presume or think that he or she was all
America.' You know, 'I hear America singing' -- and that's as close as
you'd
get to it. It wouldn't be: 'I am America singing' -- it would be: 'I
hear...'

AR: That's a very important point.

RC: I thought so. I've never forgotten it.

AR: Just loop back a second to the notion of poetics and
prescription.
When I read Olson's essay on projective verse, it seems to me that he
is
primarily trying to work things out for himself and not to be
prescriptive
to others. Although of course it's had a terrific influence...

RC: Oh, but that was not his intent, literally.

AR: There was an interview that I read later on, where Olson is
looking
back and saying, 'You know, there was never any "poetics" --
"prescriptive
poetics" -- if you look at Creeley, if you look at Dorn, if you look
at me,
Olson, there's no similarity in terms of technique.'

RC: There's no similarity. No, we're not a team. The 'I' was not
autobiograpical. It was not an attempt to enclose. I remember Irving
Layton, actually, when he and Charles finally met, he apparently said
to
Charles, 'Well, I didn't think what you were doing had much to do with
projective verse.'
And Charles said, 'I wrote that one day, Irving, and the next
day I
wrote something else!'
Come on, you know...

AR: Some of your own work, and some of the work of Zukovsky, I
think,
looks back to the lyric form as it was in Elizabethan or
pre-Elizabethan
poetry. To put it very crudely, lyric poetry, let's say, since Donne,
includes an ego. This runs through the whole course of poetry in
English,
whether American or indeed any other national literature using
English.
There's an attempt, it seems to me, in post-World War II American
poetry to
look back to a lyric which is more to do with air and music than with
the
ego...

RC: I hear. Yeah. I was thinking of the sense of 'the divided
creation'
in a curious way, Allen Ginsberg's phrase... I just bought, in Herne
Bay,
in the bookstore there, I was walking by, and suddenly saw the
Collected
Works of Christopher Marlowe selling for $3.00 and I rushed in and
bought
it, because he was a great hero of mine years and years ago. And I
opened,
I saw this edition sitting there you know it was a new book and, I
opened
it up, and it opened exactly to the page, 'Oh, I'll leap up to my God!
What
pulls me down?' And I thought, well, this is for me: that's certainly
something I could quote immediately.
That moment is remarkably locating for me because the 'I' in
that
poem is 'I' -- it isn't 'Everyman' or it isn't Pilgrim's
Progress. It's an
absolutely specific isolated singular 'I' and I can't think of a
moment in
English Lit where that presence is more specifically there. I'm sure
that a
more apt and closer reading could say, 'Yes, Bob, but you know, it's
here
in this poem, prior, it's here in this text...' But that moment in
Marlowe
for me, at least in my own imagination, dates that entry of that
singular
'I' for, you know, for all time.
I mean, it's got, hopefully it will change, I don't see any
pleasure in it. I think the situation is just as described. That weird
isolation and pain of being singular is curiously realised, there,
more
aptly and more vastly than probably any other moment...

AR: But it's a legacy that has gone to American literature in a
very
particular sense.

RC: [Laughter] Louis's voice was terrific, a classic accent which
I loved.

AR: Do you see yourself and your own poetry in that tradition?
Pound
turns to Whitman and says, 'I make a pact with you,Walt Whitman,
because
I've hated you long enough.' And there's a sense of the anxiety of the
father but also moving on beyond it, a lineage being affirmed at the
same
time as it's being put in perspective. Is that the constellation that
you
would put yourself and your own work in?

RC: There was an initial section in my Collected Essays I called
'Elders' and those are specifically Williams, and Stein, in a modest
sense,
HD in a modest sense... They were late late late coming to my own real
use.
Stein earlier than HD. But I came to Walt Whitman late actually. Not
until
I was about thirty did I really read him seriously.
I had several that I loved once, say, in college or probably a
little before. I loved Herrick, I loved the scale and deftness of his
sounds. I loved, what little I knew of Campion, I loved... I loved
that
whole sort of cluster... I loved the so-called Jacobeans, I mean,
really a
kind of hip mournfulness I really thought was great. I mean everybody
from,
you know, from Donne, obviously, but Crashaw... I liked all of them, I
thought they were really, really various... Vaughan I thought was, I
thought Vaughan was just, Henry Vaughan: WOW! You know? 'I saw
Eternity the
other night...' That was just -- far out! Great.
But the person probably most terrific for me finally is
Coleridge,
S.T., Samuel T. -- I really thought he was terrific. When I was in
college,
one of the great tests of significance was whether or not one had read
substantially in the Biographia Literaria. Few had. Many were called
but
few were chosen. Few were able to do it. I felt always therefore a
lightweight, but I loved Coleridge. I really thought he was glorious.
And Hart Crane I love. I also love Hardy. I love
Lawrence. When I
came to collect, happily, my Collected Poems, I wanted a quotation
that
would give measure, almost like a benchmark for the imagination of
determining authority, and I quoted from Lawrence's 'Hymn to Priapus'
D I
thought, you know:

Grief, grief, I suppose and sufficient
Grief makes us free
To be faithless and faithful together
As we have to be

...I thought that was, not only in sentiment, but... It was just
perfect really.

AR: How are things now, do you think?

RC: In the world? Pretty awful!

AR: In terms of the writing of poetry, looking back on that period
of
the 50s and 60s...

RC: I do miss the, both the ambition, not simply as 'Tomorrow the
world!' But I remember Olson's phrase 'Take a big bite!' 'Come into
the
world!' It seems that things are a bit faint, given the awful, you
know,
consternations of the literal world...

AR: Do you mean, do you think, that the sights have come down too
far?

RC: I think somehow the, not so much the... There seems... There
are
some poets who absolutely are otherwise but they are certainly not
young in
the usual sense. I think of Susan Howe whom I have immense respect and
love
for as a poet. A cluster of women actually. Rosmarie Woldrup, Leslie
Scalapino's incredible sort of intellectual explorations are vivid and
terrific. I think the... Not that the men are therefore faint, but
the...
The enterprise, the imagination of the world, as a place one
lives
in specifically and actively and therefore particularly in relation to
the
life one either wants or presumes to have or thus experience, I think
there's a curious faintness.
I can't imagine why there's not a more -- not just outcry --
but why
isn't there more D why is poetry so curiously faint? It has, in
fairness to
poets, one might remark that it basically isn't if one's thinking of
so-called 'ethnic' poetries in the States or poetry engaged with
absolute
social determinants.

AR: These are more robust...?

RC: Yeah. These are much more robust. The reflective poetries for
the
moment are curiously faint...

AR: Is there a concomitant quality of gentleness that's been
developed?

RC: It's hard to believe, thinking of the awful bleak situation in
Yugoslavia. It doesn't seem to be a gentler, kinder world in any place
that
I'm aware of. I mean, it's unremitting brutality.
Thinking of the States where the provision for... I think the
largest poverty group now are children... All the families having 18
year
old persons or younger in their households are, largely, below poverty
level... I mean, I don't see any... It's a kind of awful...
It isn't even rationalism. There's a kind of sense of, almost
like
the Puritan elect, 'If you're poor you deserve it!' And 'It's either
through shiftlessness or absolute incapability that you're in that
state!
It's very hard therefore to sympathise with you.' I mean, 'You've done
it
to yourself!' You know? That's in the States now. That's the absolute
imagination.
That, there's a, you know, whether it be the arts, the cutting
off
of funding, the cutting back in education, the... Simply, 'You're
either a
winner or a loser.'

AR: Poetry should oppose that?

RC: Well, poetry should... Yeah.

AR: Or, poetry does oppose that?

RC: Any agency that's humanly available should oppose that or
might
oppose that... And it's hard to, it's like Williams: 'We go to our
deaths
in silence.' I miss the passion or the engagement, however futile it
may
well have been, but you know, people circling the Pentagon, chanting,
'Out,
demon, out!' Well, that was a great imaginal moment or a great moment
in
the authority of the imagination...
I love... Penelope has this sense I trust absolutely, humanly,
I
mean, whatever discrepancies as people, or whatever, however, to speak
of
ourselves as people... It's almost like 'Dover Beach'... You know,
'Dover
Beach'? You know that sense of 'Stay true!'
I do respect absolutely the sense that humanly one has the
choice,
in so far as there is any, of committing oneself, to pledging, or thus
stating loyalty to another person, and recognising what humanly that
means,
and that the choices inherent in that pledge, really, give, what human
response and resource and dignity and recognition ever can, and the
rest is
whatever it will be, but has virtually not a hell of a lot to do with
being
human, however dear, you know, however terrific. But being human means
being... I mean, again, I love that poem, 'To be faithful and
faithless
together as we have to be.' I mean it's not being pious about it but
to
recognise that that's seemingly what the human lot has to deal with,
'To be
faithless and faithful together as we have to be'.
But there's certainly, no, that is no excuse for being
faithless at all.